| to play devil's advocate... The article seems to be written in the context of small startups.This is an inherently risky (and risk tolerant) environment. The biggest risk is usually internal. Fail to make a good product, or the product isn't popular... If your chance of total failure in the next 3 years is alread 25% or 90%, then adding 2 or 10% risk can be reasonable. This is an abnormal situation. A related concern from a few years ago was FB & Twitter "as a platform". In some cases, the risk paid off. Take Tinder, for example. Tinder doesn't work at all without FB and plan-B is probably terrible. That's not a risk an existing business could take. Tinder could because they were a startup. Using FB profiles avoided the empty profile problems most upstart social networks have. Dating is a network-effects problem. So, a 50% (or whatever) increase in profile completion rates could have been the difference between success and failure. If "NoOps" can genuinely reduce the area of competence a startup needs, and let them focus on application building (or whatever)... that can be an edge. Taking risks to gain an edge is something a risk tolerant startup can do. Of course, small companies become big companies and these decisions leave a legacy. |